Hard Drive Back-Up

Having had a hard drive corrupted at work by a power cut, I decided to purchase a Seagate Freeagent 250gb external hard drive.

It cost just under £50 and works just like a giant USB stick.

A worthwhile investment as losing all my digital photographs would be a real pain.

I've got an old 40gb as an external backup, all my wife's college work and all my pics are backed up automatically several times a day.

I was looking at getting an external drive, but I couldn't find one that hadn't got at least a couple of comments saying it had died after a relatively short amount of time. In then end I've just gone for a 500GB internal drive, and will back up from all the computers over our home network. It doesn't give the security of having it in a different place, but it was cheaper

Beware that external hard drives are very popular items for computer-stealing burglars. Ideally you either need your data backed up in some less attractive form as well (eg DVDs*), or a safe for your hard drive!

* I know that a large number may be required if you have a large collection of RAW files

External drives can use the same type of drive that can be used inside a PC - so the actual drive is just as reliable. Buying the enclosure and drive separately can save money.

Having more than one internal drive is a good idea but if the PSU goes belly up it could damage both drives - I've seen it happen! For important stuff always backup to an external drive.

I use a very small 80gb USB powered Freecom hard drive for day to day use and a mains powered 250gb Packard Bell as my main back up/archive, it is kept in a safe

I have been using Mozy (www.mozy.com) for online backup for about 6 months now - it's pretty good. As someone else pointed out external drives are great, but can still get stolen or toasted in a fire (even in a safe). Mozy is free to try (up to 2gb storage) and $5/month for unlimited storage.

The advantage of online backup is that it just happens automatically rather than you having to remember to actually do it.

Depending on how techy you are, you could also consider carbonite (www.carbonite.com) - it has the same $5/month charge for unlimited storage, but is less complex to set up.

Robin

Western Digital offers a 500 gig Mybook external drive for about $150.00 Cdn, which is in my opinion a great deal.
it has firewire/usb2 connectivity, for fast connections (I recommend firewire)
it has a sleep mode and an auto powerdown mode. the led display on the front acts as a fuel guage to show roughly how full it is. kensington lock compatible. I do not use the one push backup software on my mac because I have better automated backup schemes set up.
on my video workstation, I throw five of 'em onto a powerstrip (so I can click em all off (those power plugs draw power even if they are off, and if my system ever gets hacked..no access to my data). two are stripped as a raid for video, one has an aperture library, another a aperture vault, and the last one a backup of my macs hard drive (partioned into 2x160gig and 1x60gigs, so I can boot any of my macs off the backup dirve if needed). that way I can move a project from one mac to another easily (like when capturing hdv on my laptop, then editing on my imac or taking a whole project off location.
not perfect, and only one part of my mac setup, but if you can wrangle the drives, it works pretty good.

I've been in the IT business more years than I care to remember. Part of my service to my customers is to recommend and test backup strategies for 'mission critical' company data. Basically, that's data that, if it went missing, could cause the demise of the company.

I always recommend (in fact, I insist):-

1: Store live data on a RAID 5 array of HDD's, and have a hot spare configured as well.
2: Make daily backups to a network attached HDD or a locally attached removeable HDD.
3: Backup to tape.
4: Keep the backup drives/tapes in a fireproof safe on the ground floor near to a main entrance/exit.

The first three of these recommendations are my advice to anybody here, especially if you value your images or any other data for that matter. If your proffession is photography, follow my 4th as well.

With the cost of HDD's today, it is shear folly to commit them to one hard drive in your PC or Mac (which can suffer catastrophic failure at any time), and then only make periodic backups.

[Engage] Devil's advocate mode,

How many of us actually backed up our slides and negatives when film was the principal photographic medium? [Disengage]

I'll get my coat

How many of us actually look at our slides and negatives?

Slides and negatives didn't just all evaporate at once due to the failure of a single transistor in a hard drive or a bug in an operating system...

(although they are likely to be vulnerable to rain getting into the loft )

Robin

I was surprised at how bad colour negatives are after 30 years or so. The colours are all over the place and the different layers decay at different rates, so correction is not simple.

Scanning and Photoshop gives reasonably good resulte, but after 40 years who knows if even that will be possible.

Colour slides fare better in most cases, especially Kodachrome if it's been stored in a dark, cool environment. Kodachrome is good for may decades at least, although it fades fater than E-6 under projection conditions.

The best bet is black and white film archivally processed and stored in archival sleeves. It could have a life of hundreds of years...

Well one of my NYRs is to finally get my "find out what the heck I have in all those negative albums" project off the ground.

So I've been saving again, and I have a reasonable proportion of the price of a Nikon Coolscan V ED.

I must confess it's with some trepidation that I contemplate looking at about 25 years of negs, all taken with the Super A, and later (when the ex took that and the prints leaving me with the negs), the ME Super.

I'm rather expecting to be shocked at how awful most of them are by current standards.

Still, hopefully I'll find some gems in there and it will all be worth while. The memories should be sharp and brilliantly composed, if the pictures aren't.